One of the most hazardous tasks in industry is servicing oil wells to perform maintenance and/or repair operations on the oil wells. Oil well servicing involves removal of oil pipes from the ground (tripping out) and subsequent re-insertion of oil pipe into the ground (tripping in). Presently, oil well servicing requires significant human involvement and exposes workers to serious health and safety risks. Typical oil rig servicing systems require: a rig operator, who operates the elevator which lifts the pipe out of the ground and lowers the pipe into the ground; a ground operator, who handles the pipes that are being hoisted by the elevator and places the lower ends of the pipes into a drip tray; and a derrick man, who works on a raised platform (typically 20-55 feet above the ground) to manipulate the upper ends of the pipes into an upper racking board.
Oil well servicing involves a number of dangers, particularly for the derrick man on the raised platform. The raised platform on which the derrick man works is sometimes referred to colloquially as a “monkey board” because of its location well above the ground and the dangers posed to operators working thereon. Accidents during oil well servicing operations are costly to equipment and human lives and can damage the public image of the oil industry.
Protecting human lives in hazardous industrial applications has long been a foremost concern of industry. The inventors have determined that there exists a need to automate some of the tasks involved in oil well servicing and to provide systems for autonomously performing some of these tasks.